China is expecting a "satisfactory" harvest of autumn grains provided there are no major natural disasters, an official with the country's economic planning agency said, according to state media reports on Saturday. Analysts and grain traders are watching for signs of whether China will increase its imports of corn and other grains to add to its stockpiles, after buying as much as 5 million tonnes of corn since March.
The official China Daily cited Fang Yan, vice-director of the rural economy department at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), as saying the area sown with autumn grains would increase this year to 77 million hectares, up 46,700 hectares from last year. China's summer grain output this year, which accounts for just under a third of the country's total annual grain output, reached 126.27 million tonnes, up 2.5 percent from last year. Most of that was winter wheat.
The area sown with corn this year was around 33.5 million hectares, up over 666,000 hectares from a year earlier, the China Daily cited Fang as saying, while that planted with mid-season rice would hit 18 million hectares, up 440,000 hectares. The official Xinhua news agency also cited Chen Mengshan, chief economist and spokesman for the agriculture ministry, as saying on Friday that the outlook for the country's full-year grain output was good.
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